We Were Looking for Ourselves and Found Each Other
by SigmaTheta
Summary: Boyd doesn't arrive to clean up their mess. AU from Belonging. Slight Topher/Priya. Victor/Sierra mentioned.


_"Priya, we gotta run. We gotta run! We gotta get out of here!"_

* * *

It's strange how he can't keep his hands still. He drops the key twice before he manages to get the door open, and he stops dead only a few steps beyond the threshold, uneasy. _Home_ is generally synonymous with _safe_ to the minds of most people, but Topher's apartment is sparse and unwelcoming. Most everything he cares about is in his office instead. He usually only spends the few hours required to sleep and shower here. Lately, he hasn't even been doing that.

He slides his hand along the wall until he finds the light switch and steps aside to let Priya enter. She walks past with her head down and her arms wrapped tightly around herself, smearing bloody handprints into her clothes. Topher opens his mouth to tell her to be careful about touching anything, but then snaps it shut when he realizes how stupid that sounds. He is not a criminal mastermind; he has no idea how to cover up a murder. At Nolan's house, he'd used his sleeve to try and wipe their fingerprints from the door, but with the body laying not ten feet away, it had felt pretty useless. By the time anyone finds traces of blood on the floor of Topher's living room, they'll have already figured out what happened.

Instead, he points out which door leads to the bathroom and tells her that the towels are under the sink. The door shuts softly behind her, and she leaves a red-brown smear on the doorjamb. Topher wets a paper towel in the kitchen sink and wipes it away.

He rummages through his closet for something that might fit Priya without falling off her thin frame. An old college t-shirt he never bothered to get rid of and a pair of sweatpants with a drawstring are the best he can manage. They pass the basic test of not being covered in blood like her other clothes, so they'll have to do for now. He can buy her something else later.

He cracks the bathroom door open just enough to drop the clothes in and thinks about crime shows where they track the guilty party by his credit card use.

* * *

She's sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest and her back against his couch. Her hair is still wet and soaking through his shirt (definitely too big for her). She says, "Won't they look here first?" and it's the first thing he's heard from her since she called him in a panic, her voice brittle and strangely flat.

"Maybe. Probably," Topher says, "but not yet." He rubs his palms together anxiously and realizes they're still a bit sticky with blood from touching Priya's hands, pulling her to her feet and leading her out of that house. (Funny, he thought he'd washed it all away. He hopes this doesn't make him go all Lady Macbeth, because crazy really isn't a good look for him.) He clears his throat. "Someone has to realize Nolan's missing. Then someone has to realize you're missing. Then the Dollhouse has to realize I'm missing. I don't think anyone's looking for us, yet." He pauses long enough to peel his hand apart. "But we should probably leave in the morning. Go…somewhere."

She nods, takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly and silently. Topher thinks of crime shows again, where people are on the run or undercover. He wonders if he should offer her his bed to sleep on or offer her something to eat or if he should just keep standing here with his arms crossed, staring down at the top of her head while she studies the tiles of his floor.

She looks up, and it startles him out of his thoughts. "Do you keep any beer here?" she asks in a whisper.

That he can definitely offer her.

* * *

The funny thing about hotel desk workers is _they don't care_. They don't care whether you're on vacation or meeting your mistress behind your wife's back or running from the law. As long as you pay and don't destroy the room, they won't give you a second thought.

Topher's heart is pounding in his throat as he talks to the man behind the desk. The man just hands him a cardkey.

* * *

On the second day, Topher suddenly realizes, "You're tagged."

Priya looks up from idly rearranging the little bottles of shampoo and conditioner. "What?"

He walks toward her and makes a sweeping gesture with his hand as he talks. "All Actives are tagged with a GPS strip after they're wiped so they can be monitored during engagements," he explains. "They'll be able to use that and find us no problem."

She stares at him for a few seconds. "You keep us _tagged?_" she asks incredulously.

Topher lifts his hands defensively. "It's a safety measure!" he insists. "If something unexpected happens during an engagement, it lets the Handler find the Active and get them out of a dangerous situation, and…you don't want to hear me defending this."

Priya sighs and leans back against the sink. "Do you know where it is? The…GPS thing?"

He nods and takes a few more steps forward. "On most Actives, it's placed at the back of the neck, near the hairline so it's not very noticeable." He reaches a hand out toward her and then hesitates, letting it hover between them. Priya nods her permission, and he presses his fingers to her skin, feeling for the slight bump. "Yours wasn't a special case that would require it to be moved, so it should be – oh, right here."

She reaches her hand up to where his fingers stopped to feel it for herself. She lets her hand drop back down as Topher pulls away. "Can you take it out?" she asks.

* * *

Topher keeps his back turned while Priya takes off her shirt – she'd rather not get blood on anything else – and lies down on the towel they've spread across one of the beds. She sighs loudly and resignedly says, "Let's get this over with."

Topher closes his eyes and shakes his head. Then he turns around. He carefully lays out the first aid kit he'd gotten from the front desk and the steak knife he'd stolen from the deli down the road – and rather futilely tried to scrub clean in the sink – before climbing onto the bed beside her. His fingers quiver lightly as he brushes her hair away from the nape of her neck and gently feels for the GPS strip. He rubs an antiseptic wipe over the area, picks up the knife in his left hand, and slowly lowers it to her skin.

"Your hand is shaking too much," Priya tells him urgently.

He looks up, meeting her eyes in the big mirror over the sink, and realizes she's quite right. He pulls the knife away. "Sorry," he breathes. "Nervous."

"Aren't you a doctor?"

He laughs uneasily. "Technically, yeah," he says, "but I'm not so big on the whole blood and cutting into people thing. I haven't done anything like that since school." Off her look, he adds, "There's a reason I work on people's brains from the outside, okay?"

Priya sets her chin back on her forearm. "Just be careful and hurry," she says, holding her hair out of the way.

Topher nods. He lifts the knife again and takes a few deep breaths until his hand is somewhat steady. Then he spreads his right hand across her shoulder blade and slowly presses the point against her skin. He feels her flinch – the knife is duller than it should be for something like this – and mumbles, "Stay still, or my hand'll start shaking again." He shifts his grip as he pries under her skin, trying to work the little strip of metal out without causing too much damage. Finally, the edge is exposed enough, and he grabs it and firmly pulls it out. He quickly presses a damp washcloth to the cut and tells her to hold it in place.

Priya reaches back with one hand and presses down, wincing slightly from the stinging sensation. She lifts her head and watches Topher stand up, carrying the knife and the metal strip carefully, and hurry over to the sink. "What are you going to do with it?" she asks.

"I don't know," he replies, turning on the faucet and rinsing the blood from the knife and the GPS strip, scrubbing at the little bit that wound up on his fingers. "Flush it down the toilet or something." The water runs pink, and it didn't seem like that much blood a second ago. "If we had something heavy, we could smash it first."

"Will that work?"

He lets out another quick, nervous laugh. "I've never been on the run from an international organization that tags people and tracks them, so I wouldn't really know."

* * *

Priya doesn't sleep very well. He hears her toss and turn each night, sometimes hears her wake up with gasps and short screams.

_When we go in the pods, Sierra cries._

When she falls silent, he knows she must be awake. He rolls onto his side and leans on his elbow. "Priya?" he whispers. She doesn't respond, but he can still hear her quick breaths. "Priya?"

"Could you make me forget?"

Topher blinks across the dark room. With the light from the window, he can just barely see the outline of her. "What?"

"If you had that chair, the one you use to change people…" She trails off for a moment, and her voice is barely audible when she repeats, "Could you make me forget all this? Just this?"

Topher considers it. "Probably, yeah," he says. "I could keep your original scan intact instead of updating it during the wipe, and then…Yeah, I could." He doesn't mention Echo or Alpha or Whiskey or any of the other thousand little things that make him wonder how much control he actually has over the human mind.

Priya lets out a shaky breath. "I don't want to remember."

He watches her silhouette for a moment longer. Then he rolls over and closes his eyes. Topher doesn't have nightmares like she does, but he doesn't really sleep either.

* * *

It's about a week before they have their first close call, and really, Topher's almost glad. The longer they got away without consequence, the more paranoid he was getting.

He hadn't expected it to happen quite like this, though. He walks outside, looks up, and does a double take as he recognizes Echo from across the street. He snags Priya's elbow as she passes him and drags her back into the convenience store they'd just left.

"What is it?" she mumbles once he lets her go, rubbing at her arm.

He glances at her, and the panicked expression is enough to make her stop glaring at him for the rough treatment. "One of our Actives," he whispers, looking back out the window.

Priya comes up behind him and follows his gaze. "She looks familiar," she says, sounding puzzled.

Topher laughs. "Of course she does. Everybody manages to remember Echo." He shakes his head and continues surveying the street, looking for the tell-tale black vans. None are in sight as far as he can tell, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. He looks back toward Echo and realizes, much to his alarm, that another Active has joined her. Of course, it would have to be Victor. He warily looks over his shoulder at Priya.

Her brow is furrowed and her lips are barely parted as she stares across the street, seeming momentarily hypnotized. "He…" she breathes, barely audible. She suddenly realizes Topher is watching her instead of the scene across the road. She blinks. "Are they looking for us?" she asks.

"Maybe," Topher says. "Or they could be on a completely unrelated engagement, but I'm not about to walk up and ask them." He backs away from the window. "We should stay here until they leave."

"And then move on?" Priya suggests.

Topher bites his lip. LA is a big place, but there's only so long you can hide from Rossum in the company's own shadow. "Yeah."

* * *

There are times when Topher thinks that his life exists as a series of increasingly unhelpful clichés. The desk worker tells him the only room they have left is a single, and Topher mentally checks another one off of his list.

"My role here as the guy is to graciously allow you the bed and offer to sleep on the floor," he says as they stare the narrow mattress down. "How it goes from there depends on what kind of movie we're talking about."

Priya gives him small smile. "We can share without it being awkward," she insists.

"You notice how they always say that in movies right before it gets awkward?"

They try it anyway, and it's exactly as uncomfortable as Topher expects. He keeps shifting, as subtly as he can manage, to try and make himself at ease without touching Priya or falling off the edge of the bed and cracking his skull on the nightstand. He wants to sleep on his left side, as usual, but that would mean facing her, which is too much at too close a distance.

This goes on for about the first hour before Priya grabs his shoulder and digs her nails in. "Stop fidgeting," she commands, and he instantly freezes.

Now he lies flat on his back, staring at the ceiling and breathing slowly. He can tell without looking that Priya is not asleep, and he's not about to try moving again until she is.

Priya shifts slightly and lets out a sigh. "That man we saw," she says quietly, "he was an Active, too?"

Topher turns his head to look at her. His eyes have adjusted enough to pick out her face in the darkness, but her expression is so blank that it hardly helps anyway. He nods, "Yeah."

"I know him," she says. A frown crosses her features. "Or…No, I don't. I've never met him before. I've never even seen him, but…" she trails off. "Who is he?"

He watches the confusion spread across her face, the flicker of half-formed memories, impressions that simply couldn't be wiped away. He inhales deeply and breathes out, "Victor?" and it's not the question his tone makes it out to be. He thinks back and wonders, briefly, how long Victor was allowed to sit and wait, wonders if, once he's wiped, he'll go back and wait longer still.

_Victor, it's time for bed._

_But where is Sierra, please?_

_It's time for bed now, Victor._

Priya nods, because the name sounds_ right_. "I think," she begins, and then stops immediately with a small shake of her head. This isn't just a passing thought; this is something she knows. "I love him," she says, as strange as it feels. She turns and meets Topher's eyes. "Is that real?"

Topher stares, takes in the fragile, hopeful expression on her face, the hint of fear just behind her eyes. He realizes, quite suddenly, that he wants to touch her cheek, brush the hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear. He curls his hand around the scratchy hotel sheets instead and says, "It's real." He closes his eyes and turns away from her, opening them only to stare at the ceiling once more.

* * *

They make it across two state lines before they are finally, inevitably captured.

They get roughly shoved into the back of a van by an imprinted Active and his Handler working together. Topher doesn't recognize either of them, so he figures they must be from another Dollhouse, maybe the one in Dallas. He thinks about how furious Adelle must be. Not only did she lose control of her own Active and employee – and when she's been under such scrutiny lately – but she had to rely on another House to get them back. Topher almost laughs.

Priya's shoulder is pressed against his, and he can feel her shaking, though she's doing a good job of playing calm, otherwise. Topher isn't nearly as calm as he looks from the outside, but there's something to be said for knowledge. He knows that, more likely than not, the Attic is what awaits them. That's terrifying in and of itself, but at least he knows what to expect; he's put people in the Attic before. Priya is left with a horrifying lack of knowledge, only able to wonder at her fate. Topher finds her hand and squeezes lightly, and for a moment, he can almost feel blood between their fingers again. "I'm sorry," he whispers, "for getting you into…" He sighs, and the Active watching them glances in their direction before looking away again, disinterested. "I thought I was helping."

Priya strokes the back of his hand with her thumb. "Thank you," she says. Topher looks up in surprise, and she smiles at him, just barely. "For trying," she adds.

After a few hours, the van stops, and they get transferred to a company jet. They're put in handcuffs and kept separated for the rest of the trip back to LA.


End file.
